


dawn before the rest of the world

by erebones



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Boys In Love, Fluff, M/M, Sleepy Cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-07 23:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20984177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erebones/pseuds/erebones
Summary: After everything, Lio watches the sun rise.





	dawn before the rest of the world

Morning comes slow after a long, late night that spun endlessly between the stars, threading from constellation to constellation until Lio lost track of where the horizon stopped and the sky began. He’s still awake, against all odds. He should have been asleep hours ago. But he’s made it this far—it would feel blasphemous, somehow, to give up now.

He leans against Galo, who is solid and warm at his back, each breath like the swell of the tide. He’d seen the ocean, once, when he was very young. Before the promare became part of him and left him craving heat, sand, the grit of bone-dry desert between his toes. He had stood at the end of a long pier and watched the ocean come in slow. Inexorable. _Inevitable_. So much bigger than anything he’d ever seen. There’s a similar feeling to the rhythm of Galo’s diaphragm. Bare skin to bare skin, heartbeat buried under muscle and bone, the drift and sigh of air through sturdy lungs. Lio could keep time by him, if he had a mind.

A soft breeze stirs his bangs off his forehead and he tilts his head into it. On the horizon, across a sea of rooftops and wreckage, the first splintering rays of the sun smolder like a banked fire. The sturdy bulk beneath him rumbles sleepily and buries a nose into the crook of his shoulder.

“Why’re you still awake?” Galo rasps.

“Sun’s rising.” Lio leans back into him further, arching out of the duvet that swallows them both like a nest at the top of Galo’s apartment building. It’s a quaint little area, almost a courtyard, with potted plants stacked on top of A/C units and benches made from old crates under the spidery black swoop of electrical wires. From here they can see the whole city, spread out beneath them like a jagged, toothy quilt. Lio curls his toes into the pebbled rooftop cement and hums as Galo wraps strong arms around his waist.

He shouldn’t be here, really. He’s technically still under house arrest until noon today. He and Meis and Guiera. But the sentences passed yesterday—no jail time, just community service under the jurisdiction of Burning Rescue, which they’d already been doing, sort of—and then the whole crew had celebrated late into the night with pizza and shitty beer and board games at Ignis’ place.

Lio should have gone back to the safehouse with Meis and Gueira. But his generals—no, his _friends_, had been sloppy drunk and handsy by the end of the evening’s festivities, leaning all over each other, and when Galo slung an arm around his shoulders and asked, drunkenly, if he wanted to stay the night… well, Ignis turned a blind eye, and Lio couldn’t say no.

It’s hard to say no to Galo about a lot of things, he’s found.

“‘S beautiful,” Galo mumbles. Under the duvet, his hand spreads wide across the flat of Lio’s stomach. Lio can feel every callous, every scar that marks his palm, and a story for every one. It makes him shiver, even though he isn’t cold.

“Yeah. It is.”

Beyond the cradle of the mountains, the sun rises. Lio knows he shouldn’t be looking at it directly (_not anymore_), but a thin film of haze spans the lower troposphere, staining the sky a murky red, and it’s hard to look away. The sky changes so slowly he can scarcely mark the transition. Lavender pools in the foothills, turning rosy; the underbellies of clouds look dipped in gold. Around him, the air is cool, but Lio feels warmer than he has since the promare left, flooded with brilliance and light.

Then the sun ascends, parting from the mountain range’s velveteen slopes, and he has to squint or look away. Jet fumes become trails of fire, blazing like tear tracks along the sky’s broad face. Clouds thread and splinter and break apart, and the sun behind them is a pale yellow disk, like butter, like the sand that sifted into hills and valleys around the Burnish camps, protecting them from harm. It hangs heavy above the horizon, a jewel at the throat of the world.

Slowly, slowly, the brilliance fades. Lio is left feeling like a husk, brittle at the edges—he breathes and he can practically hear it rattling in his lungs, a pinball careening back and forth in search of even ground. He laces his fingers through Galo’s, holds him tight.

“Had it always looked like that?” Galo whispers. There’s a hitch to his voice—surprise, maybe, or uncertainty. He rests his chin on Lio’s bare shoulder.

“I don’t know.” He finds Galo’s forearm under the duvet and grips it hard just to feel its hardness, its strength. If the sky makes him feel like he’s falling, Galo makes him feel like he’s caught. Held. Precious. It’s been so long since he’s allowed himself to be soft. “I’ve never seen it from this high up before.”

“Me neither.” Galo’s thumb rubs over his ribs, his sternum, over scars long healed. It tickles, a bit, and Lio squirms back into his grip, grinning. “I sleep through sunrises, mostly.”

Lio has watched the sun rise many times, not always by choice. Oftentimes he would pick himself up out of bed early, to keep watch, to make plans, to try and figure out their next steps. He remembers sitting on the cold metal edge of a strut, poring over strategies in his head, as the sun clawed its way over the desert’s flat horizon. The volcano blocked most of the first light. It had a glow of its own, deep red and hungry.

Lio’s stomach rumbles.

“Breakfast?” Galo suggests. His voice is still a static rumble, rough like the pilled inside of a much-washed sweater.

“We haven’t even slept yet.” It’s an empty protest. His head feels full of fluff, eyes dry, but the warming daylight calls to him, coaxes him. He wants to curl up in bed, but he wants to stay here, but he wants to sit across a narrow table from Galo, knees knocking, and stuff his face.

“Just saying.” Galo yawns straight into his ear. Charming. “Been awhile since pizza.”

Lio considers this. “Will you carry me?” he asks. Only because he’s tired, exhausted beyond sense, and the perpetual knot of fear in his stomach has finally begun to subside. Only because Galo is mumbling mouthy little kisses to the line of his shoulder. _Where is my shirt? Oh yes, on Galo’s floor. _

“I’ll carry you wherever you wanna go,” Galo says. He’s exhausted, too—even with the smile in his voice, he’s much less boisterous than Lio is accustomed to. Galo is nothing like a Burnish, who all learned early that it’s better to be quiet, put your head down, avoid drawing notice. Galo is a flashing neon sign in comparison. “What are you thinkin’? Ice cream? Pancakes? Ramen?”

Lio squirms and wiggles til he’s sideways between Galo’s legs, knees tucked to his chest, ear to Galo’s whalesong heartbeat. “Ice cream isn’t a breakfast food.”

“If you get it on waffles it is.” Galo has relocated his chin to the top of Lio’s head, and his hands to Lio’s back and arm. It’s like he can’t _not_ be touching him if he can possibly help it. Lio doesn’t mind all that much. “I don’t think that place is open yet though…”

Time slips between Lio’s fingers like smoke. One moment he’s blinking away the brightness of oncoming day, the next he’s opening them with a start to a deep, rattling snore. He can barely think straight, just enough to haul the duvet over his head—when did it get so fucking _bright_—and curl back down against Galo’s chest.

When he wakes again, the sounds of a living, breathing city surround him, buoying him up out of sleep. He’s warm, _too_ warm, really. Not a sensation he’s accustomed to. He shakes off the duvet and sits up, away from the sticky warmth of Galo’s chest, and stretches his arms high overhead.

“Morning, sunshine.” Galo is awake. He looks tired, but he’s beaming, eyes creased and glittering at their corners. Lio reaches up and touches the lines above his brow with a gentle thumb. Those lines weren’t there before, he thinks. Before Kray’s betrayal. Before the rebuilding.

“Sorry I fell asleep on you,” Lio murmurs. His eyelids still feel heavy, like he could pitch forward and wrap himself in Galo and find sleep easily all over again.

“‘S alright. You’re not heavy.” Galo puts a hand in Lio’s hair to ruffle it, and just ends up smoothing it back from his face. He’s all oily from sleeping under a blanket on top of another human, but Galo doesn’t seem put off. “You still hungry? I think that ice cream waffle place is definitely open now.”

“Am I… allowed?” Lio ventures.

“Why wouldn’t—oh. Sure? Why not? It’s almost noon, maybe. Probably.” Galo’s fingers catch on a snarl in his hair and he winces, whispers soft apologies as he combs through Lio’s wild mane. “You’re a hero, babe. I don’t think anyone’s going to say anything.”

Lio wrinkles his nose, unaccustomed to such endearments, but when Galo pouts at him he leans in and brushes a kiss to his lips. Soft, sour, dry-edged like the rising sun. “Carry me,” he says against his mouth.

“All right.” Galo grins, eager as ever, and Lio loops both arms around his neck. “You’re the boss.”

**Author's Note:**

> sorry this is so short, i wanted to write some softness and fluff. might do a prequel about how lio loses his shirt. i loved this movie and i adore these boys to pieces. find me on twitter @rachebones <3


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